“Any resemblance to real events, to persons living or dead, is not accidental. It is DELIBERATE.”

Z is, quite simply, the finest movie about politics and political struggle ever made. With apologies to Battle of Algiers, thrilling in its own right, Z is a masterwork of satire, a vitriolic lash against the suffocating fascism which gleefully masquerades as democracy, and brimming with the sort of dark humor that thrives upon tragedy and exhilarates with disasters. The film is unique in seeming action-packed with fast-moving scenes of people who mostly talk or sit still; this is high-impact politics where two immovable objects collide and annihilate. Just as he did with the exemplary Missing, Costa-Gavras brings a powerful voice to cinema and excels at examining the difficult nature of politics while never losing sight of the human core that is crushed underneath the weight of a conflict.

The opening quote from above is only the first of many playful salvos to assure you that this is not the sort of timid work that avoids provocation to maximize the size of an audience. Loosely based on events in Greece in the 1960s, Z is meant to take place in Anynation, during any time period. In 1963, popular leftist deputy Gregoris Lambrakis was assassinated in Athens, and an investigation by Christos Sartzetakis found connections between the assassins, the police, and fascist extremist elements in Greece. The far-right government of Greece consolidated power by military dictatorship in 1967 and Sartzetakis was imprisoned. The junta remained in power until 1974 with the help of military and economic support from the United States. Throughout, Lambrakis’s memory remained fresh in the minds of the citizens, and the symbol ‘Z’ became a rallying cry, meaning ‘He (Lambrakis) is alive’. Sartzetakis became an icon of integrity, but it is important to remember that while he was imprisoned and Lambrakis murdered, they were both known as communist villains under the junta while the murderers were ‘rehabilitated’ as heroes of the nation. It only takes a bit of repetition and on-message bloviating to rend even the largest personality asunder, changing their legacy with the help of demagogues. Z is about not only the intrigue surrounding the aftermath of a political assassination, but the attempt to bury a legacy and the extraordinary sacrifice required to simply maintain the truth.

The immortal Yves Montand plays the charismatic physician-turned-politician whose is poised to win the presidential vote. He attends a rally that has been sabotaged by the police. Threats and bureaucracy have denied them a proper venue for a rally, and thugs are dispatched to ensure a violent scene that can be blamed on the communists. In front of a frenzied crowd, with a phalanx of policemen watching idly, a truck speeds into the square and an assailant clubs the contender on the head. He falls to the ground, never to regain consciousness. As the right wing government moves to cover up the incident as a drunken accident, the leftist party tries to release the information, and the man’s wife watches silently as her whole life ebbs before her eyes. Often movies that focus upon politics forget that real human lives are lost and the twisted scar of broken families is easily forgotten. It is to Costa-Gavras’s credit that Montand’s character is always at the center of the story and its outcome. He dies, and his party is prevented from making any further statements by the police. All would have been lost were it not for the work of an investigating magistrate who discovers that the autopsy shows not that he was struck from the side by a moving vehicle, but from above with a club, making murder the only likely possibility. A photojournalist uncovers the connections between a right-wing extremist group and the police, and the structure collapses in a breakneck paced procedural ending in a finale that will have any reasonable viewer on their feet as the sacred cows of the administration are indicted for premeditated murder. All of that was possible due to the magistrate being a trusted member of the legal system, and a fastidiously apolitical judge. Testimony from known leftists is tossed out as unreliable, and pressure from conservatives is ignored. He methodically builds a factual case that catches the corrupt police chief and his minions off guard. The labyrinth of lies collapses in impressive fashion as the viewer is pulled rapidly through the mess.

The film does not end there, however, balancing the relief of seeing justice done with the cold and unsentimental truth that justice is rarely complete. The magistrate is replaced, witnesses are murdered, perpetrators exonerated, and the junta takes power and bans peace movements, music, labor unions, sociology, Tolstoy, Sophocles, Chekov, Pinter, the free press, and the letter Z. The viewer is jailed in a wall of text from all those things reactionaries find so hateful. Depressingly, this is the only way events could go. Conservative ideologues, for all their bleating of democracy and freedom, have little use for either once their power is threatened.

Costa-Gavras is anything but subtle, and his dark and unforgiving tone has been criticized as the voice of a cynic. I am not sure if that is even something one can criticize in a director. Z is his most famous work, and is a gem of progressive filmmaking. Despite its expeditious pacing, it would be a distressing slog were it not for a vicious sense of humor. The film opens with a montage of increasingly ridiculous medals, all made to cover the blunt corruption and dishonor of those who wear them as talismans against their own worthless nature.The intellectual poverty of the right wing is repeatedly attacked with a series of sly jokes, starting with a rather silly and dull lecture about diseases to an administrative forum. The ‘isms’ so dangerous to deeply conservative politicians are compared to fungal diseases in crops, which must be sprayed with copper sulfate to prevent their spread. That a right-wing extremist government cannot tolerate competition from populist movements is but one facet of the commentary. That the extremists find this sort of thing edifying is funny in itself. When recalling the scene of the murder, the right-wing thugs, policemen, and politicians all use the same phrasing in a clever play upon their inability to think independently. When several of the members of the murder plot are indicted, they attempt to leave the magistrate’s chamber through a door to the left, which is locked. They are uncontrollably driven to the right whilst being photographed by the press, soon to be banned. Not the most subtle symbolism, but considering the density of these references, this quality makes the film accessible. In the final bleak aftermath scene, the journalist telling the story of the investigation (as to a television audience) becomes part of the photographs as his arrest is announced. Sardonic wit is all one has to view a tragedy in motion without becoming depressed.

Still, no story ends – not even somber ones. The junta fell eventually when anti-American sentiment and pro-democracy movements started to gain ground. Intellectuals exiled by the dictatorship, the enormous popularity of the 1969 release of Z, and pressure from other European nations opened a factional split in the junta, leading to a counter-coup, loss of support of key military officers, and a collapse of the dictatorship. That a right-wing extremist government that utilized torture and denied basic human rights (cough) was seen as an ally against Communism was embarrassing to the Western Bloc of NATO, and delayed the incorporation of Greece into the European Union. Most importantly, the history of this dictatorship stands as a reminder that such things can happen rather easily under the right circumstances. For this unfortunate reason, Z is timeless, and will never lose its relevance.

It begins with a suicide. Not a particularly nasty suicide, mind you, as the victim all but rests his head on a desk as if curling up for a late afternoon nap. The gunshot immediately brings forth a second character, though she’s a none-too-panicky sort who may as well have stumbled upon spilled milk in the kitchen, rather than the freshly minted corpse of her beloved husband. And so we have 1953’s The Big Heat, Fritz Lang’s hot little ticket to the noir sweepstakes; a film as tightly wound as any of the big name entries, though one of the few to recognize the inherent pleasure of watching Lee Marvin toss scalding hot coffee into a woman’s face for having the audacity to live up to her loose character. The woman in question, Debby Marsh (Gloria Grahame), remains one of the era’s most scintillating dames of ill repute; the sort of tramp who isn’t above adding a dash of class to her gutter ballets, even as she’s readying herself for the inevitable fall. Standing above the din, though only for as long as it takes to lose his pretty young wife to murder, is Glenn Ford as Dave Bannion; a righteous detective whose fealty to truth and justice renders him absurdly naïve at best, and embarrassingly impotent in the long run. He’s a sucker who insists on peeking behind the curtain, even if it costs him everything he holds dear.

When it turns out that the opening suicide is a fellow cop, Bannion obligingly pursues a few leads, though his pavement-pounding turns up little save the usual half-truths. Seems the old guy was in a sickly way, and he could no longer take the pain. But what’s a wife to know? And what about the B-girl, the one who emerged from the dead cop’s bustling stable just long enough to reveal her nasty little secret of seduction and false promises? Foolishly, she believed he was about to divorce his wife, though she wouldn’t be the first by-the-hour starlet to assume life could be built on the remnants of a motel quickie. She doesn’t buy the official story, and while more vague than exact, her tale is just enough to get her killed. By the film’s well-dressed dialogue of the period, it’s apparent that she was raped, strangled, burned with cigarettes, and tossed out of a moving car. Her body quickly turns up, however, what with this sick town being not so sick as to ignore nude females bloating roadside, and Bannion quickly theorizes that there’s more here than a tired cop who casually cheated on his wife. His decision to keep his nose to the stink lays the groundwork for the requisite tragedy.

Bannion’s domestic life, so achingly Eisenhower in its honey-I’m-home banality, turns hellish in all the time it takes for wifey-poo to meet her maker through the crudely effective means of a car bomb. Only the dynamite was intended for Dave, and the killers didn’t anticipate her need to pick up the babysitter. Though the car appears only to have suffered minor damage (yeah, it’s on fire, but only the hood is crushed), Mrs. Bannion dies most cruelly, as she’s pulled from the wreckage without so much as a black smudge on her cheek. But die she must, as Dave must become world-weary and vengeful inside by the next frame, a task taken on with full fury by the ever-reliable Ford. We believe him and in him every step of the way, even if he’s more likely to knock a goon to the ground than dirty his piece. Bannion is after the men who slaughtered his wife, yes, but he’s also on the march to bring down the whole rotten enterprise; a town so teeming with corruption that city officials think nothing of playing cards with gangsters and low-lifes, even if it would be impossible to explain why you’re spending your evenings with a guy who looks like Lee Marvin. Semper Fi sumbitch though he was, few men walked so fine a line between barrel-chested toughness and Mongoloid ugly. It didn’t help matters that Lang lit the poor bastard like he was an escaped exhibit from the travelling freak show.

But at least there’s the whiff of manhood about him. The crime boss, Lagana, is an effete slug with a mother complex; the Norman Bates of the rough-and-tumble syndicate. When Bannion visits his estate one evening, ostensibly to get answers, Lagana is dwarfed by a massive oil painting of the sainted mama, leading to the inescapable conclusion that his “gang” is just about the only socially acceptable manner by which to indulge his locker room fantasies. And the more vulgar the better. Typically, Lagana forces others to perform the heavy lifting, proving yet again that wherever there is a powerful man behind a desk, there is a near-fanatical need to overcompensate for fears of sexual inadequacy. It’s no stretch to believe that Debby once nestled under Lagana’s well-tailored arm, only to be shoved aside for yet another glimpse of mother-dear. Even there, she took a beating without complaint, but soon learned that with Vince, she’d at least get a pillowside reprieve from the pain, no matter how brief. And while Lagana stews in the juices of opulence, flattery, and perfumed luxury, it is the brutishness of his underlings who are cast in the sweatiest of lights.

And yet, Marvin’s Vince Stone is practically heroic in his dimwitted adherence to the criminal code, the very one that secures a swell penthouse pad in return for the joy of smacking around the non-compliant. And so we come back to Stone’s arm candy, Miss Marsh, the very one to be so kind as to stand still to receive her boiling cauldron of Folgers. Though tipping its cap to Cagney’s grapefruit in the same breath it calls for more aggressively leashing our womenfolk in the post-war era, the disfigurement is, by Debby’s estimation, not entirely unwarranted. After all, she openly chased after Bannion like a lost puppy, and was she not prepared to put flesh to well-starched sheet after a mere five words and a shot of cheap whiskey? So when you come back late, both interrupting a highly-charged card game and humiliating Vince in front of his boys, it’s hardly unconscionable to spend the rest of the picture with half your face wrapped in gauze. Debby knows the score, and though now resigned to a life in the shadows (she even returns to Bannion’s apartment and insists the lights stay decidedly dimmed), she’s just a sap, after all; a one-tricky floozy without the self-respect to stay off her back now and again. Needless to say, she bucks up, stiffens her resolve, and wrests control of the justice train at long last, though not out of any sense of nobility. She’s up for the martyr bit, but who’s to begrudge her a long-needed fix of bloodlust? Though her “resurrection” is not entirely unexpected, the manner and timing must come to the viewer unexplained, as a buzzing light in the night sky.

But what of Dave Bannion, this one-man crusade for righteousness? It’s telling that he fails to kill a single man in his quest (even the final shootout with Vince remains wound-free), and one wonders if Lang would argue that vigilantism must, by necessity, be a hollow pursuit. Bannion can’t pull the trigger in numerous contexts – he even brushes aside a heaving Debby with a widower’s soppy guilt – so has the call been made for men of less explosive tendencies to lead us to the suburbs? If we become like the city, do we not die amidst the rubble? All of this seemed moot when Bannion started choking the life out of the crooked cop’s scheming wife, but even there, true release must yield to the coitus interruptus of an ill-timed intrusion. And hell, Bannion’s efforts, while boosted by the underpinnings of a clenched jaw and lifeless stare, could not match Debby’s noble deed. While Bannion stroked and slapped and pounded himself to no avail, Debby used the female orgasm for good, rather than ill. Revolutionary to be sure, but quickly stifled by a politically hypocritical decade that channeled such electricity into self-loathing and pill-popping deference. Women could, in theory, still bloody their knees and submit to being passed around like a bubblegum card, but never again would their potency outwit the male of the species. In just a few short years, Bannion would always get his juice back, even if it had to wait until the final act.

After his one-two punch of Knife in the Water and the superior Repulsion, Roman Polanski appeared poised to become the contemporary answer to Hitchcock. Both are thrillers, minimalist in nature and depend on character development to increase the tension to a palpable degree, but Repulsion shows extraordinary maturity in the skill of its craftsman. A film that was quite controversial in its time, Repulsion focuses its narrow lens upon the fragile state of mind of its protagonist, who is twisted into painful knots of paranoid delusions whilst drowning in an ocean of sexual repression and fear of intimacy. As played by Catherine Deneuve, the character of Carole Ledoux is an opaque, blank-eyed cipher, withdrawn and fearful of the world around her– in particular, men.

As time progresses, and her mental state begins to decay during a harrowing weekend spent in near solitude in an apartment that appears to grow and shrink in Kafkaesque fashion, we are allowed to see deeper into her tortured psyche. The walls crack, maniacally grinning men lie in wait to assault her, and a skinned rabbit carcass progressively rots (only the most obvious of the visual metaphors). The violent end that approaches becomes almost sensible, and perhaps for the heroine, cathartic. As an atmospheric exploration of cerebral breakdown that is thankfully short on pat explanations, Repulsion excels.

There is something else going on here, though. The subtext is at first muted, but with time and the progression of the behavior of the male characters in the piece, Polanski’s hand shows all too clearly. The film is an exploration of contemporary marriage. Marriage itself functions mostly as a business arrangement designed to bring financial stability to the family structure, without which the first sleepless night spent changing the tenth shitty diaper would send any sane man packing pronto. The legal bond of marriage is not necessary for love or intimacy, but it is essential for the progressive mind games that resemble cabin fever in their intensity and requirement of close quarters. That women are somewhere between opportunistic and insane needs no further discussion, but in the manacles of wedded bliss the quality of complacency is added, and the fate of the man is sealed. Of course the man is equally to blame for being foolish enough to enter into a bargain whereby they stand to lose everything and gain only a dinner partner for the rest of their days. The man pursues the woman, and after a protracted fight with any inferior suitors, lands his prize, only to watch it bloat, bleat, and burst forth with innumerable spawn. In a majority of cases, the end result is divorce, only to be followed anew by the chase and capture of another wife, so that the same painful cycle can be repeated because men have the attention span of gnats.

In Repulsion, the heroine lacks several critical bolts that might have held her together. That she is afflicted with crippling paranoia is but one choice amidst a vast buffet of psychological perforations from which Polanski could have chosen. Carole exhibits primarily cluster A traits consistent with both paranoid and schizoid disorders given her extreme fears and suspicions. Whether the rapist who visits on a regular basis is a hallucination or an obsessive dream is up for debate. Carole appears to dance improbably across the personality disorder spectrum, with strong borderline symptoms (her world is fairly black and white, and her behavior deeply impulsive) and a mixture of avoidant and dependent personality disorder features. She has extreme social and sexual inhibition as well as a devastating dependence on her sister, whose mere absence from the apartment has driven Carole to the brink.

Though it is very rare for a psychiatric case to have symptoms this broad, it can be said that the character is meant to be representative rather than realistic. To wit, all women are this crazy. The only difference lies in which cluster of personality disorders they may have.

One young man is smitten with her, asks her out to dinner, and continues to push and chase her in the streets until he finally breaks down her door to make plain his obsession with her. When his brain is properly tenderized and his body dumped in the tub to decompose, it can be safely assumed that the ring is on her finger and vows have been exchanged. There is no need for the former romantic figure, brimming with optimism – that poor bastard can be left to the rats and roaches. At this point, the cynic is about to arrive. And arrive he does in the form of the landlord, who also breaks down the door (after boards have been nailed up as a fair warning) to make clear what the deal is. The primary issue is money, as it is with all nuptial agreements. Money then mutates into a power struggle, no doubt because little miss mindfuck has little earning potential while declining to bring any other skills to the table. This ends as it should, with the straight razor opening every exposed artery, and the man bleeds dry and the sofa is upturned on his lifeless body (fitting, as he has been sleeping on the sofa for the past several weeks). A better description of divorce would be difficult to come by, unless one prefers metaphors involving the rectum. Finally the door is broken down one last time by Carole’s sister, who discovers what the protagonist hath wrought. Her limp form is carried from the apartment by yet another man, who is keen to turn a blind eye to the devastation of the scene. In short, the divorcee, despite the alimony, child support, and literal and figurative scars, is ready for further punishment.

Now, bear in mind that this opinion is heavily shaded by my own experience, and my personal feeling that marriage is for those who feel that they were born with an excess of limbs and vital organs and can do without much of either. You may have the exact opposite of my opinion based upon your experiences – and we would both be correct. Such is the charm of truly solid cinema, that we can see what we view as our own truth, all the while enthralled by the story as laid out by a master of the craft.

It would be all too easy to dismiss Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point as a failed relic of hippie excess; a notorious auteur’s survey of the swingin’ sixties that predictably falls on the side of righteous youth. In fact, I steeled myself for this very result, and from the opening credits — scattered shots of campus radicals yammering simplistic slogans that did nothing to disabuse me of my negative expectations — I was set to slog through the standard clichés of fighting the machine, embracing experimentation, and living with perceived authenticity. But as the film played out before me, my notions of Antonioni’s overall intent shifted with jarring force. By the end, knowing that Antonioni has always confounded easy interpretation, I realized that his indictment — and the movie, despite it all, remains as such — was not at all in the realm of the obvious. Far from pro-hippie, anti-Man, or being supportive of the radical element that flourished throughout the decade, this is a brutal, unyielding attack not on America, per se, but what America hath wrought in the form of its alleged rebelliousness. Our country is not empty and barren simply because it erects billboards on every conceivable roadside, but rather because it no longer possesses the language, insight, or strategy to challenge anything worth a damn. It is, simply put, alienated from even knowing how to be properly alienated anymore.

Lest that sound ridiculous, consider that Antonioni has chosen as his symbols of the new order the two least interesting human beings on the planet; two ciphers so bereft of even the most minute levels of self-awareness that were it left to them to instigate revolution, the whole damn enterprise would suffocate from boredom. This is no accident. Mark and Daria are not Bonnie and Clyde revisited, but dimwitted dullards who can’t even be bothered to act rashly. Sure, Mark steals a plane and flies to the desert, but does so only after attending a protest and, well, failing to do anything at all. He appears to have the desire to shoot a cop, but someone else steps in before he can act, the first of many ineffectual efforts by our two “heroes.” Mark is clearly upset by something (though his wooden performance makes it difficult to establish any emotion save ennui), but he lacks all the tools for converting his turmoil to agency of any kind. While his plane ride might be misconstrued as a daring act of freedom, it’s best to see it instead as a fool’s errand; a journey to nowhere by a truly unimaginative man. Even on the flight back to Los Angeles, he does nothing more than paint the stolen plane with hippie buzzwords and loud symbols, as if he were from another planet armed with a self-styled handbook about anti-establishment behavior on Earth. There isn’t a genuine gesture to be found, as it’s all artifice. Score one for Antonioni.

He strikes again with his portrayal of Mark and Daria’s desert love affair; to date one of the least inspiring romantic endeavors between two otherwise healthy, attractive youngsters. There again is the point in bold colors: we expect virile youth to take shots, abuse the system, and either get away with our applause, or die trying in a hail of sexy gunfire. Instead, the pair meet on a lonely road after Mark plays footsie with Daria, with a plane and car substituting for actual appendages. They talk in dull monotone, though with the sanctimonious conviction of the period, and play around as if skipping through the sand could solve issues of hunger and poverty. Then, in a flash, they are naked; rolling about with abandon, in a montage that seems to go on forever. Antonioni, cleverly, also shows dozens of like-minded couples frolicking in the dust and dirt, pointedly reminding us that while claims were made to change the world, all these kids really wanted was a place to fuck and get stoned without interruption. The mess and tangle of flesh, at least here, is meant to emphasize the interchangeability of these so-called revolutionaries. One, at last, is as worthless as the other. Privilege never pushed a sea change, it only fostered an entire generation of armchair assassins who lectured far and wide with the good fortune of having somewhere to go after the whole thing fell apart.

Not much happens during the film’s 110-minute running time, but that’s in the spirit of the director’s stubbornly consistent vision of the human animal. Abandoning instinct, desire, and creativity, we fall back on traditions and robotic rituals without considering the possibility of an alternative. I have little doubt that Antonioni craves a new chapter for our species, but here, he’s arguing with vehemence and conviction that whenever the call may come, it won’t be coming from America. It’s not just that we’ve been reduced to taking to the streets only when we discover personal inconvenience, or, in the modern era of the college campus, finding more cause for alarm in the enforcement of drinking laws than the erosion of free speech or global voting rights; we are simply not cut out for the fight. Reasonable, sympathetic protest died with the Civil Rights movement, and the era on display in Zabriskie Point might as well be on the moon by comparison. Some claimed it was an immoral war that stoked the fires; I saw the call for sacrifice that now reached white suburban doorsteps, and the kiddos were spooked to hell by the line now crossed. Antonioni may have supported raised fists against Vietnam, though he wisely avoids any specifics here. All he cares about is that whatever the cause, it won’t ever be enough.

The most talked about — and caustic — turn in the movie is at the end, when a desert retreat (where executives building a well-to-do housing community discuss their plans) is blown to hell from a dozen different angles, though only in the madness of Daria’s imagination. Having learned of Mark’s death moments earlier (he was gunned down on the runway after returning the stolen plane), Daria stares blankly ahead and is greeted by the massive explosion. The flames are not, however, a call to arms against suburbia, white people, or wealth. Instead, the blast is only possible in the minds of the limp and powerless. They craved big, important gestures, but in the end, had nothing lasting to say. That said, Antonioni isn’t even suggesting that the building and all it symbolized should have been destroyed. Radicalism bent on mere opposition — as accurate a representation of the hippie movement our language affords — cannot, by definition, lead an individual life, let alone a city, nation, or widespread cause. Lacking practical solutions or details, abstract “missions” wither and die when stripped from their placards and hastily photocopied leaflets. In the end, Antonioni saw beauty in our physical environment, and even in our faces, but we hadn’t the muscle, the balls, or the brains to move beyond prettified exteriors. It seems we left more than our clothes behind in the desert.

With a timeline in the billions of years and a choice of vistas from the highest mountain peak to the deepest ocean trench, Nature is the greatest of cinematographers. Even the most routine of moments possesses tremendous beauty and commands our attention  as a crucial component to an elegant system. With the changing of the seasons, key elements converge to create massive spectacles that stagger the imagination. For six of our planet’s most impressive events, David Attenborough is there to highlight not only the exquisite artistry, but also the fragile constitution of the system that makes these events possible. As always, the spectre of human intervention hangs heavily over the proceedings, as climate change, consumption of habitat for farm and industrial land, and outright extermination of species threatens these and other events across the globe. If you appreciate visual pageantry, or if you want to give your Blu-ray system a serious workout, this is the documentary series that will do the trick.

Two episodes in particular are standouts, and both take place on the African continent. ‘The Great Tide’ refers to The Sardine Run, taking place every few years off the coast of South Africa, where a shoal of sardines numbering in the hundreds of millions is lured from the cool ocean depths to the African coast where the world’s largest army of predators has gathered to ambush them. The sardine groups are drawn into cold water, as warm water tends to exist along shallows and coastal areas where their numbers cannot protect them from predators. As the cold Agulhas current pushes up along the coast during the winter months, it pushes back against currents coming from the north; this creates an abnormally frigid coastal artery that attracts and then traps the sardines.

The documentary spends ample time developing the characters of this mighty clash. Cape Gannets, remarkable in their stark beauty and their aerial dexterity, breed off the coast in enormous numbers, but the chance of survival for an individual chick is slim. Once they are strong enough to fly, their parents abandon them, and they have ten days to learn to fly or starve; if they successfully achieve flight, there is a chance they will falter in the breakers (hundreds are battered to death in the waves) or be killed by a seal. One gannet, thoroughly beaten by the relentless waves and rocks, hauls itself upon land and dies, the moment containing all the gravity of Shakespearean tragedy. If they survive, the gannets will form an integral part of the Sardine Run spectacle. They are joined by common Dolphin, who expertly hunt down and round up the sardines into small ‘bait balls’ that allows for easier hunting of individual fish. Various sharks, from Ragged-Tooth to Great Whites, take advantage of the dolphins’ work. Lastly the Bryde’s (pronounced Broo-duhs) Whale dives in to take ten thousand sardines in a single gulp. Once the predators find the shoal, the attack begins and is sustained with impossible intensity. The roiling sardines, expertly moving dolphins, and the divebombing gannets form a stunning visual poetry that transcends wildlife filmmaking and drifts into the realm of ageless elegance.

The other episode is less visually intense, but documents the violent and rather abrupt change that occurs in the Okavango Delta after intense rains fall upon the Angolan highlands and spill into a river that terminates not into a lake or ocean, but into the driest desert on earth. The Kalahari is almost devoid of plant life during its dry season, but the camera crew finds a herd of elephants struggling their way through this lethal setting. The matriarch is there for a reason, however, as she knows that the rains will fall, and the parched sands will come alive. Still, the tension created by this narrative is quite real, and most involving as you follow them into an uncertain future. When the precious water finds its way through dry river beds into the sands, the entire vista is transformed into a lake. As elephants, lions, cape buffalo, and various other savanna animals enter the fresh waters, we notice that the land itself seems to have come alive; fish explode from a distant marsh, and many species of frog actually live permanently in this desert, using the brief presence of water to exit hibernation, eat, breed, and reenter hibernation in an endless cycle.

Despite the triumphant moments the animals share, there is no guarantee that the life-providing cycle will continue. As the climate changes, water supplies dwindle, and the natural habitat that the flora and fauna require to replenish their numbers continues to be destroyed, these remarkable events may cease abruptly. Very little is understood about how these and most wildlife ecosystems really work. And therein lies the black-box warning: unless research into the intricacies of the planet’s ecosystems accelerates and serious effort is made to properly fuse the habitat of the human with the rest of its fellow species, disaster is guaranteed.

In the same year that Star Wars was shattering box office records and shifting the culture to a new dimension of merchandising, special effects, and unending Mark Hamill mania, an old icon was inhaling the fumes of a once proud career. That man was Evel Knievel. With the infamous Snake River Canyon jump three years behind him, Knievel was dying for a hit; a new enterprise by which to recapture the country with his unparalleled flair for the dramatic, as well as one of the world’s most enviable heads of hair. Thankfully, Hollywood was coked up just enough to throw a few million his way, and what resulted was Viva Knievel!, a film so legendary that it was quickly disowned by everyone within earshot. A film so incompetent, so dreadful, and so uniquely embarrassing that co-star Gene Kelly would sign on for Xanadu as a cleansing ritual. A movie so egregious it would think nothing of asking Leslie Nielsen to play a drug kingpin, or worse, that Frank Gifford be paraded before incredulous eyes wearing the same mustard sport coat and ketchup shirt on three separate occasions. It’s the sort of clueless action-adventure with precious little by way of actual motorcycle stunts, but enough out-of-control semi-trucks to satisfy even the most hardened veteran. And without a sense of humor in sight, it’s just about all we can take when Dabney Coleman shows up as the head doctor of a ritzy Mexican sanitarium.

After all, it’s damn near impossible to salvage an ounce of credibility when, during the film’s opening scene, Evel breaks into an orphanage to shower the apple-cheeked children with Evel Knievel toys, one of which is so inspiring it causes a crippled boy to throw away his crutches. At that moment, a lumbering nun appears, roaring, “Darn you, Evel!” The anger quickly subsides, as the good sister is bribed with chocolate. But how much does our hero really love the children? Consider his reaction to an affectionate hug by the weakest, most vulnerable of the kiddos: “Back off, little guy.” Excuse me? I’d say the tone was aggressive, but Evel rarely wavers from his marble stare, so any intended elbow to the ribs will remain forever unknown. And yet, when the soundtrack kicks in, it promises excitement. And why not? This is the most famous man in the world — a daredevil, a showman, the Gorgeous George of stunt work — and who could resist a tune that refuses to offer any words save “Evel” and “Knievel”?

Admittedly, Gene Kelly’s first appearance forced me to cringe, what with Singin’ in the Rain and Inherit the Wind already on his resume, but he quickly won me over with his dynamic attire from the Ralph Furley collection. No man should be expected to bear the cross of that much orange in any one picture, but Gene pulled it off with the usual class. As if it had to be said, Gene plays Evel’s right-hand man; a former stunt man of great renown who now tends to the bikes and makes sure the jumps come off without a hitch. Before we can adjust, Gene is kicking the crap out of Red Buttons, and trying desperately to avoid his 10-year-old kid; a boy whose Barry White inflections betray a much older man, as if the resemblance to the kid from The Omen weren’t bad enough. But Gene wants no part of him, as he is blamed for killing his beloved wife during childbirth. It’s a subplot that goes nowhere, but it does allow us to see a once great dancer and screen talent reduced to phoning in a fistfight with a disco-era madman.

Immediately, it is apparent that no man in this movie will be allowed to button his butterfly-collared shirt above the navel, including Leslie Nielsen. Especially Leslie Nielsen. Showing dramatic chops unequaled until Creepshow, Leslie is the bad guy of the story; a rat fink drug lord who just happens to be the kind of criminal who hatches his evil schemes while eating breakfast poolside. And what a scheme it is! In order to smuggle $3.6 million in cocaine into the United States, Nielsen will lure Knievel to Mexico with the carrot of $500,000 in jumping gigs, all so that his bike can be rigged with an explosive, thereby killing him before a packed house of thrill-seekers. Then, having placed EK into a coffin that will be housed snugly in an exact replica of the stuntman’s big rig, the body will be brought back to the States stuffed to the gills with packets of white powder. It’s foolproof, I say! If only Nielsen hadn’t conspired with a glory-seeking rival to seal the deal. You just had to know that the kid would crack under the pressure, causing him to spill the beans to Knievel, but only right before he’d crack him over the skull, grab a handy EK jumpsuit that just happened to be lying around, and attempt that doomed jump himself. Pride always goeth before the fall. No matter; we’ll just throw the phony Knievel into the coffin and take our chances.

One would have thought that the plot’s unraveling would have constituted the movie’s conclusion, but it droned on for at least another half-hour. In that span — complete with Gene’s “death” and resurrection, a chopper/semi chase scene that all but stopped time, and Knievel’s hilarious sideswipe of a goat — I could reflect on what I had seen play out before me. There was Gifford, playing himself, screeching uncontrollably about “never having been witness to such excitement,” even though the bastard played in the goddamn ‘58 NFL Championship, a.k.a., The Greatest Fucking Game Ever Played. But no, an aging asshole in a star-spangled jumpsuit flying over a trough of flaming Pico de gallo has that beat. To add to the danger, Gifford deadpans, “Any mistake will cost him his life.” Or that Gene Kelly again, inexplicably locked up in Dabney’s booby hatch, where he screams violently and attacks Evel with fists flying as if he alone were the reminder of a career now officially off the rails. Or hell, even the dialogue, where EK spits, “That kid’s your number one fan! Why, he’d take on the Supreme Court for you!” And then, with a shot, I’d flash back to the opening stunt (involving a jump over lions and tigers, some of which, according to Gifford, “weigh almost 200 pounds each!”) where EK harangues the weary crowd with an anti-drug lecture. “You think you’ll do well,” he cries, “and for five or ten years you will…” I will? This is a cautionary tale, Evel? Then comes the kicker: “Then you’ll blow up!” It’s a terrible thought, though the crowd eats it up.

Evel is seriously hurt during that first jump, and though hospitalized, he appears to have suffered little more than a dirty forehead and mussed hair. But the champ considers retirement, that is until the evil rival teases him with the Mexican offer. As Evel loves tequila (and money), he readily accepts. In addition to Gene and his kid, EK invites Gifford and the crusty female reporter he will later kiss with a decided lack of passion. And what the hell happened to Red Buttons? But this is Mexico, where women throw roses from balconies, and the sweet aroma of Latin love inspires EK to snarl, “Big deal…There’s always a revolution in South America.” After a few kidnappings, crying kids, and overheard conversations, Evel is suddenly dressed as a doctor so he can speak to Gene. Soon, Evel will burst through the hospital’s front door on his bike, shoot out the lock on Gene’s rubber room, and ride away. Pushing forward once again to the final moments, Evel proudly sits atop his metallic steed, driving through bars (to remind us it’s still Mexico, all the patrons wear sombreros) and across mountainous roads, the last of which has a convenient drop-off, just in time for Nielsen’s Porsche to shoot into the air, roll a few dozen times, and explode in a fireball. In more ways than one, EK has thrown his hat into the all-too-successful drug war. Evel didn’t get that bloat and paunch by sitting on the sidelines, my friend.

If it doesn’t make sense in the telling, it makes even less sense as it actually plays, and all told, it just might be the worst film of the period. Why it isn’t more revered in bad movie circles is beyond me, and it’s more in line than ever to be resurrected as a cult classic. Now that Evel’s dead and buried, it’s fitting that we reconsider his life and times in a new light. The Evel of Viva Knievel! is hopelessly bereft of all charisma, yet this man captured the imagination of millions for years on end. His jumps, had they been housed by the more global media machine of today, would have been so momentous as to paralyze the culture from considering anything else. It’s even possible that he could have ridden his motorcycle straight to the White House. He even hated drugs just enough to have been a modest force for self-righteousness. So what if we’re the type to be hypnotized by sumbitches who haul ass down long ramps, only to crash through beast and flame, breaking backs and limbs along the way? Just keep them on the field on honor, away from that ever-alluring camera, offering but the siren song of an easy paycheck. He needed to be Lawrence of Arabia, when the best he could hope for was Elvis on wheels.

In any honest film that centers upon religious belief systems as a general theme, then delusion is required to be a secondary theme. Being based on a Flannery O’Connor novel, however, Wise Blood goes that extra mile and is populated entirely by people who are coprophagically insane. There is not a single redeeming character within, which makes sense taking place in the rural deep south. No two individuals have conversations with each other, talking past people and through them, babbling on with internal discussions that would sound more reassuring coming from the other side of the locked door of a padded room. I hated every single character in the film and began to consider the value of prayer, as it would be the only practical way to initiate a rain of napalm upon every square inch of soil south of the Mason-Dixon line. As directed by John Huston, who clearly hates southerners with the fury of a tempest, it is a bleakly depressing film that breaks down religion into its component parts of desperation, ignorance, and revenue with machine-like precision.

At the helm is the perfectly-cast Brad Dourif, as a wild-eyed fanatic who fancies the notion of knowing The Truth. Most of the characters either believe in God indifferently due to a lack of interest or information about an alternative, or believes that God can be a great source of income. Hazel Motes (Dourif) truly believes in God, and his messenger Jesus, but he has come to the conclusion that Jesus is an asshole. The greatest ambassador that Jesus ever had was Hazel’s father, and as played by Huston himself, he brought the gospel that all of humanity sinned from birth and deserved a lifetime of pain and suffering before dying and receiving, well, more pain and suffering. I believe Reverend Motes was intended to be Baptist, but he appeared more Catholic, as there is no religion more dependent upon self-loathing and ritualized sadomasochism. Hazel is plagued by daydreams in flashback where his father frightened him to the point of pissing himself, and instilled a strong belief that experiencing pleasure was the most vile crime imaginable. And so Hazel Motes returns to his home state to preach his own evangel, for his newly founded Church Without Christ, “Where the blind can’t see, the lame don’t walk, and the dead stay that way.”

He is surrounded at all times by signs imploring the populace that “Jesus Saves” and so he understands that his mission is a difficult one. His pulpit is a dusty Buick, and despite being as riddled with holes as his theology, it is a mighty chariot. As he intones to any garage mechanic who dares insult his whip, “No man with a good car needs to be justified!” The film would be amusingly quotable if it were not so mired in hateful characters. Competing with his testament are an army of con-artist ministers (it is debatable as to whether there is another kind). One is played with guffawing vigor by Ned Beatty, and before Hazel can get a few words out, he takes over with aplomb, praising this prophet to the heavens while collecting dollars from the gullible crowd that has gathered around the Buick. This is an essential part of the southern economy, made up of the hustlers who know they are full of shit, and the vacuous flock who would like to forget they are full of shit. They give up their meager earnings for being convinced that life is not meaningless after all, and the ministers can stay flush with hookers. Everyone is happy.

Like any O’Connor story, it is brimming with southern-fried twits who are not as much ‘eccentric’ as they are ‘fucked in the head’. A boy who must be retarded as well as pathologically lonely attempts to help Hazel by stealing a mummified body for his use as a new Jesus, then thefts a gorilla suit to shake hands with the masses. A Lolita-type girl tries to seduce Hazel whilst regaling him with creepy stories from her adolescence, although being from the rural south, probably has never known a story that wasn’t deeply revolting. Her father is another hype minister who pretends to have blinded himself with quicklime, making him a more effective beggar, I suppose. Even the authority figures are missing several crucial bolts upstairs; a sheriff pulls over our protagonist, and rather than issuing a ticket, proceeds to push his car into a pond. Well, why not.

Though not entertaining in the traditional sense, Wise Blood shows the cunning craft of Huston, who sets up the world within the film only to knock it down. The images are unforgettable and visceral, from Huston’s own vile preacher to the sight of barbed wire wrapped around Dourif’s body. There is more often than not religious text written on a wall somewhere in the background, lacking in proper grammar and correctly spelled words, but always promising judgment on behalf of the God who both loves and hates you always. Dourif must be either coked up or diseased with mania, because he perpetually has the look of a man prepared to chew nails as he makes his mind known.

Hazel Motes may style himself as a vessel of Truth, but he has never fully escaped his self-disgust. While belting out the words to apathetic followers that Jesus is not needed to survive, he knows that it is only a matter of time before his resolve weakens and the Jesus pounded into his brain during those formative years returns to collect his soul. And so he is held in thrall, the one man with integrity in a melange of barely-human mental midgets awash in gleeful insanity. And so he becomes Jesus when his Church Without Christ crashes down around him – at least he does not attempt to be one of the blind leading the blind. Within the grip of religion, if one truly believes, rather than simply humoring the traditions of religion in a harmless fashion, then one must live without hope, looking forward to basking in hellfire as punishment for having lived a life devoid of enlightenment. Maybe Jesus had a point in advocating such harsh comeuppance, though he was dead wrong on the reasons for it.

That mother nature is a ruthless cunt should be evident to anyone with a working knowledge of evolutionary theory or an aficionado of wildlife viewing. Watching an army of ants dismantle a forest full of animals or a polar bear devouring a baby seal is enough to press home the point that the flora and fauna of this lone inhabited planet pursue their survival without a shred of sentimentality and waste not a single fragment of time or effort for impractical reasons. Strange then, how few nature documentaries get this right, going for the heart strings with delightful images and romantic notions that are wide of the mark enough to actually damage conservation efforts. The world is relentlessly brutal, and being rather rough beasts ourselves, we are capable of appreciating how this works and that we have a place in this elegant system of slaughter and endurance.

Luc Jacquet seems to understand this ideal, and it shows in his accomplished documentaries. Though the award-winning March of the Penguins was scarred by an awful commentary track by Morgan Freeman that eschewed words like ‘dead’ in favor of ‘disappeared’, it remains a visually rich work punctuated by images that inspire admiration and unease for how these animals survive. The egg freezing instantly upon contact with the ice and killing the chick within, as well as the weaker birds on the edge of the mob freezing solid in a storm spring to mind.

He evidently has a passion for Antarctica, and it shows in a DVD collection of his earlier documentaries, each of which show a keen eye for detail, and it is this detail where he happily parts from most directors of nature films, failing to edit out the stomach-churning moments or shun the uncomfortable themes. This comes from having enough respect for nature not to gloss over that murder is an essential part of any species in which there is competition – and there is always that competition – as genetic strength is necessary to weather the millennia.

In “Penguin Baywatch”, elephant seals hold court on a beach teeming with life during the brief Antarctic summer. The males of this species fight constantly, with the 16-foot beachmasters shedding torrents of each blood over their harems. The camera captures one of these older males, having fallen from grace after losing a battle, his upper mouth shredded and a slab his snout bobbing in the surf. Shortly thereafter, the exhausted male dies, while aptly-named skewers bury their heads in his flesh, collecting food for their nestlings. Within three days a four-ton elephant seal will be reduced to a clean ribcage, glistening in the fading sun. Later, a killer whale pod stalks a king penguin colony, and pursues a group of males to the beach in an extraordinary overhead sequence. Though they fail to kill, they blockade the beach while desperate parents are still out at sea. Amazingly, a part of this throng fights its way through the blockade to feed their young. Several of these penguins, however, become trapped on an offshore reef, and are surrounded by the killer whales. The ensuing siege is the stuff of high drama, and I won’t reveal the outcome except that a rare moment is captured by a seemingly suicidal cameraman. Memorable images are densely packed, including one jarring moment after a king penguin is stunned by a wave, and is ripped apart in seconds by skewers.

With the falling snows of winter, the animals depart en masse to warmer climates for continued hunting with the surviving offspring. The cycle continues, and the species move closer to either continued abundance or eventual extinction. These animals have been going though this lethal dance for generations, and the balance between them is in constant, violent motion.

“The Tick and the Bird” is perhaps his finest work, not as a strict documentary, but as a masterpiece of storytelling that comes from years of compiled observation. The Laysan albatross requires a mate, food, and the promise of offspring, as does the tick that feeds upon it. While the albatross migrates hundreds of miles, the tick never strays far from the bird for a second. The Laysan albatross has a wingspan of 2m, and nests on Midway atoll while ranging across the entire Pacific Ocean; the tick is 2mm across and can cross beach sand by the centimeter. They catch the birds as they land either on the sand or snagging them from grass. The relationship is intricate, and while the albatross fights amongst other seabirds and predators for survival, the ticks are inescapable.

The camerawork of the birds is handsome, as expected. The ticks, however, are lovingly photographed as they struggle across the sand, wave invitingly from the tops of grass blades, swarm from an egg cluster by the thousands, or negotiate their way through the birds’ plumage. Tick anatomy is revealed with electron microscopy that is a stunning achievement in itself. When the tick unsheathes a beak that looks for all the world like a chainsaw, you will develop a grudging respect for this tenacious bastard. The story follows various ticks as they travel vast distances on the albatross, survive immersion in ocean water, and swarm over newborn chicks. If the infestation is too severe, the parent may be driven away, and the ticks die in their success (or they will kill the chick quickly and then follow suit). Like all insect parasites, ticks can carry viruses and bacterial diseases that can decimate a nesting area.

One fascinating sequence follows a tick that clings to a fallen feather and is washed ashore on an island populated by eagles. Even if it could seize the bird, it would be unlikely to find a mate of the same species. If it could find another bird parasitized by the same tick, it could develop a new colony on this new island. Instead, a raven preys upon it, and that prospective evolutionary branch is pruned from the hedge.

Parasitism doesn’t get a great deal of respect, but one must behold the sheer genius in their design and the elegance of their complicated life cycles. Apex predators may only be limited in population size by their parasites, which may in fact save them from a famine-induced collapse. As such, a parasite is devoted utterly to its host. The albatross nest will raise not only the chick, but the next generation of tick hatchlings. While ticks will mate, lay eggs, and die, the albatross mates for life, and devotes a year to raising its offspring. Different tactics with the same overall strategy for survival.

The documentary shorts are uniformly excellent, packed with juicy visuals like chinstrap penguins being flung through the air by leopard seals, sharks swallowing seabirds whole, and clouds of krill so vast and dense that they blot out the sun above. The narration occasionally leaves something to be desired, but it is for the most part unobtrusive, and is a minor complaint. This DVD is not easy to find, so grab it if you can find it – this footage is refreshingly raw like a newly torn wound.

It is fortunate that Jacquet’s work does not depend upon cute moments in which one can see a faint reflection of one of humankind’s remote ancestors. Nature documentaries tend to look for humanlike behavior, so we can identify with them and perhaps understand them or gain an interest in protecting their habitats. Fair enough, but it is not only the endearing traits that animals have in common with us – humans partake in rape, murder, cannibalism, and individuals work tirelessly to deprive others of resources so as to improve their own chances at breeding. By the same token, animals are not inherently innocent, requiring the protection that we would give to children. We are not the lords of all creation, but another cog in a machine of which we have little understanding. Conservation is not about maintaining a gigantic and expensive playpen for fluffy animals with which we can identify, but preserving our own place within a hostile world that can turn upon us if we fuck it up too badly. Perhaps in some of these documentaries, these captured moments yield a clear reflection of who humans are after all.

How a drama about a convicted murderer being released from prison and attempting to find her place in an alien world could be described as ‘light’ is difficult to say. Perhaps it is due to a nuanced sensibility that did not want to nosedive into purple melodrama, or the mostly internal performance by Kristin Scott Thomas. Though a solid enough picture, and one that shuns exposition in favor of revealing background details through actual human conversation and realistic behavior, it does not do much with the search for identity apart from taking a conventional tack in the final reel with a redemptive twist that felt wholly unnecessary. Avoid the last paragraph for spoilers (or not), since I do feel the film is worth a look for the quality of the acting and for the way the particulars of character development are teased out with subtlety.

Thomas plays Juliette, just released from prison after a fifteen year stint, and from the opening shot, she is clad in a haggard mask that appears hardened by solitude and cigarette smoke. Very few words are passed, and what transpired before is hinted about more than expressed, as the screenplay trusts the viewer to keep up. She seems unsettled by her freedom and uncomfortable in any social setting where she is torn between the desire to interact and the deeper desire to be left alone. Her mask barely conceals her mixture of regret, shame, and the need to be understood. Initially, though, her primary expression is confusion at why she was let out in the first place, since her life is over and there is little point in starting over. In these early passages, the disaffection experienced by the previously incarcerated is well done. After her sister picks her up at the airport, even the most basic of conversations highlights the gulf between them:

“I finished my graduate work to get my master’s, and my husband and I moved to this town. That’s life.”

It most certainly is not. Over time, she grows to appreciate her sister’s help and affections, though she initially appears to be cold and distant. Isolation can do that to you, but she was isolated from everything and everyone she knew. “The world went on without me.” Most of these conversations are oblique, as everyone wants to avoid discussing that she was a guest of the state, and what she did to end up there. She has great difficulty speaking to anyone, and wishes to avoid any mention of the past for good reason. In a job interview, she states what that crime was, and she is thrown out immediately.

Eventually this shell cracks, and she is able to relate to her sister (The crack occurs when she assures her sister that ‘inside’ is not a preferable term to ‘prison’). Even this is difficult, as her sister had taken great pains to forget Juliette, and her parents hated her very existence. In one jarring scene, Juliette and her sister visit the nursing home where their English-borne mother is marinating in her dementia. After cursing at them both in French, she abruptly recognizes Juliette and switches to cooing in English, clearly not recalling her crime. This actually does happen to dementia patients. The underlying theme is that one can never go back, and that the past cannot be forgotten no matter how inconvenient or traumatic.

Throughout the film, the progression feels natural, and the character study of Juliette never feels forced or hollow. Kristin Scott Thomas remains luminous throughout, and is pitch-perfect down to the French language with a British lilt to accentuate that she was imprisoned in a British jail. The supporting cast is uniformly excellent, with no extraneous quirks to be found.

Despite the light treatment of the material, the film never really has the chance to soar – the conversations and awkward moments are clipped and edited into short, bite-size segments that do not allow the characters to breathe, as if the director was worried that the audience would become bored. The denouement left a great deal to be desired, as it ties up the moral loose thread that really was better left unfettered. You see, Juliette murdered her six year old son, which would make her a monster in nearly everyone’s eyes. During the film, you learn to sympathize with her and wonder what happened in that dark moment when the human side yielded to other impulses. It may be cliché to suggest that anyone is capable of a heinous act, but the idea remains fresh when allowed to spool out and remain hanging in the breeze.

There it will always remain, and the imagination of the audience can run riot with a blend of imagination and projection in how we would psychologically deal with this sort of a past. Then, in a last tear-filled monologue, Juliette states that her son had symptoms of a neurological disorder and was dying anyway. Her compassionate euthanasia breaks with the film’s prior compartmentalization of moral past and present, and casts the main character as a misunderstood hero who had a rather easy ethical decision after all. Perhaps you will disagree, but I prefer my films in shadow, with poorly demarcated edges. Even so, the film is quite compelling, and Kristin Scott Thomas restates her case as one of the most compelling and insanely hot actresses of our time.

There once was a time, right around the tail end of mankind’s greatest adventure of incalculable butchery, when the sum total of feminine experience could be reduced to a buzzword or textbook quirk. Psychological reductionism wasn’t the half of it — women were simultaneously complex and easily read; a poisonous, unholy mix of venom, rage, self-loathing, and crippling insecurity, usually topped off by a dash of murderous impulse. Cinematic dames have, of course, developed since then, even if the real article hasn’t all that much, and it’s a compelling argument just the same that we’re not the better for it. Sure, the female persuasion can still surprise us now and again – naked, dead, or in need of a good smack to dutifully align the planets – but they’ve never been as interesting as when they, in the words of the classic Leave Her to Heaven, “loved too much.” At once incomprehensibly vague and pointedly honest, it’s a turn of phrase no longer in favor, though one altogether suited to an age. Could someone, as it goes, really love too much? And what would be left in the wake of such an event? If Ellen Berent Harland (Gene Tierney) is any indication, nothing less than murder, attempted murder, a self-induced miscarriage, pitch-perfect frame-up, and blistering suicide. And to think she lost the Oscar to a more subtle Joan Crawford.

That Tierney was a looker from the old school only minimizes her beauty. Here, in sweltering Technicolor, her volcanic mounds of merciless malice, sharpened as if by the devil’s own blade, spell doom for Richard Harland (Cornel Wilde) the moment he catches her eye on a southbound train. She stares as if gripped by the be-all of grand mal seizures, yet it’s not paralysis that brings forth the fixation; she’s sizing up the poor slob for slaughter. The glare is uncomfortable to say the least, but he’s hooked, like a dumb fish unfamiliar with womanhood’s oldest, slickest bait. Who knew that they’d be off to the same New Mexico ranch, but as the decade proved, alternatives were decidedly not for the taking. It’s as fixed as the stars, and it’s enough to await the death knell. Yes, Ellen is the old maxim made flesh: beauty kills, though not with kindness, but the illusion of satisfaction. So seduced, she’ll drain you, defeat you, and pack you away like so much storage. But have you she will, and Richard follows along like a sad, sick puppy. Though locked in a deadly dance without escape, his first, most lasting mistake is the demonstration of joy. This love for, attraction to, or need of anything, large or small, that isn’t her, will only force the clamp down with more authority. Smile in any direction, and she’ll ensure it never happens again.

Richard’s “anything” is not a job, or a house, or even a former lover, but his fanatically upbeat brother, Danny. As you would expect, Danny is afflicted with polio, which means that the special bond between siblings constantly threatens to overtake Ellen’s womanly need to be worshipped. We know where all is tending, of course, and merely wait, helpless as kittens, for the two to be alone, preferably on the water, where aid and comfort is too far to make any difference. Such a body of water soon appears in the form of a lake in wild Maine (an estate wonderfully called Back of the Moon), where Ellen pushes the swimming boy to the brink so that he cramps up and drowns. Ellen’s flimsy effort to save the lad is purely for show, and before long, Danny’s lifeless body is removed, joining Richard’s one true purpose in eternal banishment. Still, the woman’s no hypocrite. Her hatred of youth and possibility also extends to her own womb, where the seed of tomorrow is crushed by a deliberate leap from the stairs. Her fetus is an infection; a nasty, irritating reminder of not only her gender, but the eventual need to express selfless responsibility. She curses the unborn child; screeches its vile name until, suddenly inspired, she removes it, spot-like, as if Lady Macbeth with legs to burn. It’s more than the vanity that abhors the puff and bloat of motherhood; it’s the wholesale rejection of existence itself.

After chalking up a few shoulder-shrugging victims to her credit, Ellen pulls what all cornered vixens eventually push on unsuspecting manhood: the suicide. Out with a bang, indeed, though her final act is to pin it on her sister, Ruth, the one decent sort in this whole mess, though she too just happens to have a thing for Richard. After Richard dedicates a book to Ruth, an act akin to genocide on Ellen’s sliding moral scale, the hysterical harlot ingests poison during a casual picnic, though she’s not spared the usual death bed dramatics. Before swallowing her destiny, however, she writes a jilted lover from the past, a man who just happens to be a district attorney, and exactly the sort to take Ellen’s accusation as gospel. No one ever learns, it seems, though he’s ambitious, and this very case could clinch the governor’s mansion. That he’s Vincent Price should surprise very few, and alarm even fewer, as his verbal dexterity takes a backseat to no one, save perhaps Rufus T. Firefly. The courtroom exchanges are an utter delight, unchallenged in their absurdity, and at the very moment the splatter of words proves too much to bear, a confession emerges to tear the whole thing asunder. Ellen’s quest is thwarted, though even from the grave, we expect her grasp to re-emerge with all the tenacity of a woman scorned.

So as you go about your day and the titans of Hollywood’s golden age fade ever more into that flickering past, salute the likes of Ellen Harland and those who bring them to life. Ms. Harland is dead and gone, like the sanctioned misogyny that produced her, but I defy anyone to equate her extinction with progress. That wonderful siren Ms. Tierney also rots beneath our feet, and who among us could ever hope to fit the bill? Sex continues, as does the female form’s capacity to induce unthinking orgasm, but few and far between are the lips and hips that could have me for a whisper. Or a glance. No one is capable of loving too much in these dreary, homogenized times, it seems, and what’s more, we wouldn’t want them to if they tried. It was a glorious past to be sure, when women had only to nudge, even nod, and we’d throw it all away. Ellen was as daffy as a loon, but she was worth dying for. And the killing, well, that goes without saying.